Mother duck is stricken by tragedy; those of a more sensitive disposition may wish to believe that her offspring are merely out of frame now, although such thinking may be too wishful to be convincing.

The provence of this poignant photograph must go back a while, but what is not clear is whether it is a spontaneously captured mini-tragedy, or an amusingly worked piece of Photoshop drama…

Definitely real.
I have witnessed this happen every year in our apartment parking lot as the ducklings dropped into the storm drain. I pulled the grate and retrieved them for the first ten years before I got too old for crawling after muck covered wildlife that didn't want to be rescued and got tired of the ones I did rescue follow their brainless mom over the same grate the next day and fall in again.
For several years the mothers would settle in the apartments' crawlspace vent wells for the night and their ducklings would jump down with her. In the morning she would flutter out but the ducklings could not jump up the 12-18 inches to freedom. I would go around all the apartment buildings before leaving for work and scoop up the frantic pooping kids while my wife fended off the angry mother ducks.
Eventually we realized all we were doing was encouraging the perpetuation of the very stupidest of a very stupid bird whose mating "dance" was essentially gang-rape. The year after we stopped the rescues no mothers were pushing their peeps into the window wells and fewer were walking them over the drain grates. Obviously the ones who had a tendency to do this id not pass it on to the next generation.